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Iowa farmer Jeff Ryan ventures out into the cold with his tractor to rescue a delivery van in the ditch.

Timing is everything. My plan was to finish chores early, then hop in the shower and get cleaned up before joining my wife and some others at a restaurant in nearby Protivin for their weekly broasted chicken feed. They have meatballs, too, so I get to keep fowl meat out of my diet. One friend is about my folks' age and is legally blind, so he can't drive. Sherill would take a car to Decorah and pick him up and I'd take a separate vehicle and meet them in Protivin.

I had just turned on the water and was about to step in the shower when Sherill knocked on the door and said, "Ellen called. She said Speedy went in the ditch and wondered if you could pull him out, because they don't have any tractors plugged in."

The first part of that sentence would be my aunt. The second part would be, to my best estimation, what she perhaps calls her son. It's winter, so maybe he just slid a bit as he made his way out the driveway on his way home after doing chores at their place. That kind of stuff is easy enough to do with slick roads. Just the other day, I was putting a round bale in the hay cannon and started to slide with the skid loader after trying to stop. (Read "A ticking sound in the hay cannon") I was sliding right toward the cannon. It was a slow-motion maneuver, too. Pulling back on the levers as aggressively as I could, I hoped to stop my forward motion before the hay cannon did. I slid right up to it and kissed the front window of the skid loader at the rate of about three or feet per minute. Six more inches and I would have come to a stop. InertiaMobile that I was, I prepared myself for the inevitable. My front window met the hay cannon and then shattered into a million pieces right as I came to a stop.

So, yeah, I can see how a guy might cut someone some slack for a no-traction mishap in the depths of winter. I decided to put my clothes back on and head over to do a little log chain work with the tractor. Seeing as how this was probably a minor ditch maneuver, I figured I'd skip taking The Snake with me. (Read "Eden, a minister, and a serpent)